Ideas and Strategies for Real-Time Personalization

As the Director of Customer Success at Apptegic I spend a lot of time using an engagement score to measure customer happiness. This single score tells me, at-a-glance, if a customer is set-up, using Apptegic, and getting value. It’s a very handy metric that I can use to manage our customer base. It doesn’t have to stop there though! I recently started working with our marketing team to help them get just as much value from the engagement score for lead generation.

Traditionally, when it comes to creating scores, marketers think of scoring leads. You can use all sorts of information, from the number of emails they’ve opened to their job title and other demographics. Scoring leads in this way can provide a ton of value both to marketing and sales and is not a new concept. However, what if we backed up the funnel a bit and thought about scoring all your traffic. As you’ll see this can greatly help you increase conversions.

First, we need to identify what kind of behavior on your site leads to a conversion, and I don’t mean taking a deep look at paths in Google Analytics. All that does is tell you the order people viewed things before they converted and is way too granular. There could be 10+ different paths that lead to success, so trying to grade people if they go down one of those paths would not only be a lot of work, but it wouldn’t scale well as new paths could develop all the time. Instead, you want to look at overall traffic patterns on your site.

One such overall traffic pattern is time spent on your site. The more interested a visitor is in your site and business the higher a probability they’ll convert. To test this, I looked at all traffic to Apptegic from the past few weeks:

As you can see, the longer you spent on the site, the greater the likelihood someone will convert. While not everyone who stays on the site for more than a minute converts, we can state that no one on the site for less than a minute converts. Therefore, we can say with confidence that if you’re on the site for more than 1 minute your likelihood of converting will go up and you’re getting engaged with the site.

In addition to duration on the site, it’s important your traffic does stuff while there! The more they do, the more engaged they are with your site. The trick is trying to figure out at what point people are engaged enough to start converting. As above, I analyzed all the traffic to Apptegic.com for the past few weeks and learned:

As you can see, the minimum number of actions (page views, button clicks, etc.) someone needs to complete before they have a chance of converting is 3.

While there are many other interesting data points to explore, such as percent of the site they saw, number of times on site, whether or not the visitor looked at specific pages, referring source, and so on, I wanted to start simple. We can always do additional analysis later and further refine our engagement score.

Armed with the two data points above I created an engagement score with the criteria that a visitor is considered engaged if they are on the site for more than 1 minute and they’ve completed at least 3 actions. I came up with this as it’s the bare minimum needed to convert on our site (based on the data in the table above). Had I wanted, I could set stricter rules, for example you need 7+ actions as the conversion rate doubles when a visitor hits that number. But as I mentioned above, let’s start simple. We can easily come back and change these goals.

I now have a pretty reliable score that tells me if someone is engaged (80+ on a 100 point scale) then they have a decent chance of converting. If they are under 80, then they won’t convert. I can also see the breakdown of my traffic and where they fall in these buckets. Armed with this information, I can now do several things.

The first is I can work on getting more people into the 80+ bucket! I can try to use messaging, change the design of the site, promote different content, and so on. Basically, I have a metric I can use to measure the impact of these different activities and I’m free to experiment and see what works.

The second thing I can do is work on increasing conversions in the 80+ bucket. I can easily identify who moves into the 80+ bucket and immediately callout our request a demo page to promote conversions. Or I could promote our churn ebook to traffic that is engaged and viewed our churn webpage, or promote other similar offers. Basically, I can now proactively work this visitor as I know they are engaged with our site (just like you would proactively work a lead that has a high score).

As you can see, by scoring your traffic’s engagement, you now have a lot more flexibility both in how you engage your traffic as well as how you measure the success of your marketing programs. You’re no longer tied to simply looking at one metric (number of leads generated) but can now dig in further to better understand what generates leads and how to get more of them!

If you are interested in learning more about how to do this, please feel free to contact Apptegic and we’ll happily assist you!